Something all business owners face from time to time is an employee who doesn’t work out. And every so often, one of these employees turns vindictive. As a computer consultant, I’ve heard stories that just weren't believable - things I never thought people would do.

We had a client who's internal IT guy was routinely reading the owner's e-mail. When the company caught on to him, he deleted the entire company's e-mail file. When he was let go, he tried to hack into the company's network. Fortunately, we had changed all of the access codes as he was being walked out of the building.

While we like to think we work with good, trustworthy people, what if we don’t? Financial motivations in this economy are leading to a steep increase in employee data theft. What if one of our employees is angry and wants to get back at the boss? A dissatisfied employee can very quickly cause serious damage by deleting data files, corrupting your financial records, or downloading viruses to your network. A good security policy is a necessity.

Secure confidential data files by setting up password-protected directories. Take advantage of built-in software capabilities to designate specific users for any software with sensitive data (financials, social security numbers, credit cards, etc.), and limit access so they have just what’s needed to do their job. Change your firewall settings to limit Internet downloads. And most important – promptly remove security access for any employees who leave your company.

You’ll have to balance safety versus productivity.  Too much security can cause administrative headaches, creating employee frustration that eventually may lead you to remove important security settings. However, it’s far better to spend a little time being proactive than to find out the hard way you should have been more careful.

With the economy the way it is, it is more important than ever to make sure your valuable data is protected. One hard drive failure could cost your company tens of thousands of dollars - more if you aren't able to retrieve your accounting and customer files.

What's frightening to me as an IT consultant is the number of companies that don't backup - or that take their backups for granted. At a minimum, you should have daily verification that your backup completed successfully. Ideally, your data is being backed up off site, or your tapes are being rotated out of the building.

But have you ever tested the recovery process? Murphy’s Law is alive and well in the technology arena. I hesitate to assume anything when it comes to computers, especially when it comes to something so critical as a backup system.

One company we spoke with had “a bad feeling” about his backup. When we reviewed his systems we found his backup hadn’t run for well over four months.

Another company…the backup was working, somewhat. About half the backup jobs finished successfully. But occasionally there was a full week of failures. Imagine if they’d had a server outage during one of those periods.

And then this one horrific situation we ran into…someone had sold this poor business owner on outdated tape technology, and the recovery portion of the software was never installed. When their server crashed, between software issues and slow tape reads, recovery took nearly two weeks.

As bad as that was, the best proof of Murphy’s Law was a story another tech shared with me. This company had a very well-organized backup regimen. Tapes were stored in the basement on a dedicated shelf. Everything was well-labelled and happened exactly on schedule. The jobs ran smoothly. There was no reason to doubt that they had a solid process in place…or was there? Unfortunately, there was. Turns out that shelf backed up to the elevator. You may or may not know this: elevators generate a magnetic field, and magnetic fields erase tapes. Sadly they didn’t discover this problem until they tried to recover old data from a demagnetized tape.

May I suggest you test your backup today?